


Advent XIX

by Tammany



Series: Assorted Advent Stories, Christmas 2014, All-sorts, some connected. [20]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Advent, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Ecumenical, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Having Faith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:35:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This one is just happy. I have a few religious/theological notes at the bottom, but going in I'd just like to say I've given a comment to a character based very specifically on his own prior lines, and with an attempt to tie it to what I think he was saying, in the sort of context he himself meant it.</p><p>It's happy. It's easy. It is ecumenical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advent XIX

The doors of the Great Hall opened, and the music flooded out, echoing up the storeys of the foyer, as light cascaded down from the high neo-gothic windows over the stairway landings and half-landings. The women hovered in the Hall, smiling and beaming. Sherlock and Father flanked John, who walked hesitantly out into the dazzling, rollicking festival carrying Baby Em in the turn of his arm, her face already alert and wondering. From the storey above, Mycroft came, attended by Lestrade who walked behind.

John, chuckling, called, “Look, Em: It’s Father Christmas and his loyal Elf Lestrade.”

They looked the part—Mycroft in a shin-long red brocade dressing gown, with crimson slippers on his feet, his red flannel pajamas showing below the hem; Lestrade in a shorter knee-length robe in shimmering deep greens that seemed to morph from near-black to forest to sudden gleaming emerald. His pajamas were snowy white, and his wooly shearling slippers a toasty brown.

Both he and Mycroft were beaming—the lords of the festival.

Em flapped wildly, all limbs in motion. “My! My!”

Mycroft smiled at her, and stepped down the final step, approaching John with all his enormous dignity wrapped around him—and his eyes shy. He hesitated, hands starting to reach out—then drew back resolutely. He met John’s eyes, and said, “Go. Show her Christmas.”

John shivered. It hadn’t seemed this…important. Not until now. Not without the sense of ritual and anticipation. Not without Mary at one side of the great double-doors, smiling at him and her daughter, welcoming them to Christmas itself.

He took a breath and looked down at Em. She’d gone from flapping and whirling and squirming to all pulled in, fists clenched tight, all her attention in her eyes as they shot from face to face, to the more distant shine and light beyond.

He stepped forward, smiling at Mary as he passed, nodded at Mummy Holmes, whose heart was in her eyes. Before he could even think to flip a smile at Anthea or locate Janine, though, the room captured him.

The tall, tall tree, decked in ornaments—old and new, some clearly going back generations. The star on top, a shining thing both delicate and dominating, commanding its high point. The presents—he had thought the tree already stuffed when he went to bed the night before, but Mycroft appeared to have crept down later and added to the heaps. It was like a sand dune or a snow drift, all the presents for and from nine adults and one child sweeping out from under the graceful branches. The stockings at the mantel were stuffed to bulging. The lights danced, set to a slow, stately random sparkle. The music was everywhere, filling the space.

He looked down at Em again. Her eyes were round, shooting everywhere. Her face was---

Oh, God, he thought. This is what it feels like—to love your kid so much it rips you to pieces. All that first-time joy and amazement. All that tender new life, responding to the celebration of life. The whole room was shouting, “Alive—you’re alive! And so is all the world! Rejoice!”

Mary was next to him, he thought. He made himself look up, meet her eyes. Her own were as teary and happy and blitzed as his own must be.

“She loves it,” he whispered. “She loves Christmas.”

“Well, who wouldn’t?” she laughed. “After all, it was put together by man with a minor government position—and a major case of Christmas OCD.”

He barked with laughter, and Em, still held to his chest, joined in, gurgling and crooning and opening up again, all arms and legs and flailing fists and giggles.

“I believe the rule is stockings first,” Mycroft murmured in the background. “And no presents till we’ve all eaten some fruit and either some fruit cake or a biscuit?” He looked at Mummy, then, and said, uncertainly. “Those are still the rules, aren’t they?”

Mummy smiled, then—a big, sweet smile, and said, “Of course they are, Mikey. You always did remember the Christmas rules.”

Mycroft smiled back, then—soft and shy, but lit with it. Then he was in motion, waving his arms, shooing this guests, saying, “Sit, sit, I’ll hand you down your stockings. Let Christmas begin!”

And as he handed down stockings and passed around big bowls to hold all the loot and pirate booty, the stereo shifted again, and the carol switched, and the voices and the horns rang out to celebrate the day.

_Joy to the world, the Lord is come,_

_Let Earth receive her King,_

_Let every heart prepare him room_

_And heaven and nature sing;_

_And heaven and nature sing;_

_And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!_

As he poured out Em’s stocking into a bowl, and handed her a solid, chunky stick of peppermint, John whispered, “Here you go, love. Christmas. It’s all about the hope in the darkest hour, and the fire in the heart of winter. Remember that, no matter what you believe later, yeah? In the heat of the battle, when you fall, bleeding, this is what you’re praying for when you pray, ‘Please, God, let me live.’” He glanced at Sherlock and Mary, then, and down at his baby girl, and added, even more softly, “And when we pray, ‘Please, God, let _them_ live.’ This is it, love. Christmas, by whatever name you call it.”

Em, gumming the peppermint stick, appeared to agree.

_He rules the world with truth and grace_

_And makes the nations prove_

_The glories of his righteousness,_

_And wonders of his love, and wonders of his love_

_And wonders, and wonders of his love._

**Author's Note:**

> I am a Religious Studies student. Graduated with honors from a good program, was going on in Mythological studies when the Great Recession made me reassess my finances. I'm the daughter of a history teacher who had me reading Joseph Campbell at an early age. I am also a demi-practicing Episcopalian of the most liberal bent. As a result I have this weird, complicated response to Christmas. As an educated Episcopalian more familiar with my faith and tradition than many, I've got notions of what it means theologically to at least some practicing Christians.
> 
> But I was brought up in a secular household in a secular community, and I'm a Religious Studies student, and I have a strong sense of how much of what Christmas "means" maps onto so many other belief systems. You do not have to believe in J'heeeeezus to know what a baby in a manger and a star in the east where the sun rises means, nor answer the altar call to understand that a festival at midwinter is about hope and life in the heart of darkness. 
> 
> I write all the characters of Sherlock as being variable in faith. Mycroft I write as being quite a lot like me: an Anglican by choice and tradition, but with too many questions and doubts and added awarenesses to be a naive or blindly accepting Anglican. Sherlock I write as an atheist. Mummy as an atheist agnostic given to faith in numbers and science. Father as a sort of spiritual-but-not-religious sort. And so on through the characters, each a guess based on canon silence, personality, likely background as given so far, etc. 
> 
> I have given John the only outright statement of prayer or God so far, I think, and the only one to tie Christmas to God and prayer--and that is because of his comment in the very first episode. When Sherlock asks him what he'd say if threatened with imminent death, he answers, "Please, God, let me live." When challenged to use his imagination, he says he doesn't have to--indicating his near-death reaction was prayer, to a hypothetical God.
> 
> That does not have to make John a man of faith in particular. I tend to see him as more likely to argue that as a soldier he feels there are no atheists in foxholes, and that as a doctor he sees miracles of creation daily, and miracles of healing occasionally, too. In other words, I see John as someone whose reaction to the marvels of the universe and the sweetness of life is to look for some vocabulary of faith which which to talk of it. No more. No less.
> 
> I hope this is sufficiently respectful of the athesist and agnostic readers. I'm--too much a Religious Studies student not to see that as a perfectly valid position, too. But when writing Christmas stories, you're forced to dance between "the reason for the season," and the fact that many who celebrate Christmas are in no sense Christian, or faithful, or desirous of being so...and, still, they celebrate, because what Christmas "means" maps onto even a secular non-theistic belief system. 
> 
> Life is good. Life in the bleak midwinter is precious. The baby in the manger, who "feeds" us all, is hope itself in the darkness. Beyond that, go in peace, believing as you will or as you must. 
> 
> Happy Christmas. Happy Advent. No matter what you believe, may the season give you light, and hope, and happiness.


End file.
